A faster finish

26 Oct 2019

Engineering capacity news posted by Andy Sandford

Optima Metal Services, a metal stockholder that also offers laser and bending services, is set to add three new 10kW lasers, a tube laser and new deburring and finishing machine. The total investment comes to around £1m.

The new Timesavers 42-1350-RB series machine carries out deburring, finishing, edge rounding and laser oxide removal and removes a production bottleneck.

Optima’s Operations Manager, Andy Knowles, says. “Previously all our deburring and radiussing had been a manual process, which was subject to the usual human inconsistencies and was also time consuming. With the Timesaver we now get consistent quality and much faster.”

When Optima first viewed the Timesavers machine there were some comments that the process seemed slow as work travelled past the rotating brushes on the vacuum conveyor. However, when applied to a working example where manual deburring a batch of parts was taking up to four hours to complete, the total time when using the Timesavers machine reduced to 11 minutes. “This one job was enough to convince everyone that this was a good move to make and by our calculations the Timesavers 42-1350-RB is the equivalent of six operators manually deburring, these people are now able to transfer to other elements of the business with upskilling and training.”

“Deburring and component finishing is an important part of the service that we offer as standard to customers. Since the arrival of the Timesavers 42 RB series the quality of finish that we are achieving has been noted and commented on by customers. More interestingly we are seeing work come back to us as a direct result of the consistent quality that we can now achieve,” concludes Andy Knowles.